Curry Chandler is a writer, researcher, and independent scholar working in the field of communication and media studies. His writing on media theory and policy has been published in the popular press as well as academic journals. Curry approaches the study of communication from a distinctly critical perspective, and with a commitment to addressing inequality in power relations. The scope of his research activity includes media ecology, political economy, and the critique of ideology.

Curry is a graduate student in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh, having previously earned degrees from Pepperdine University and the University of Central Florida.

Update: Chomsky contra Žižek

Žižek
finds nothing, literally nothing, that is empirically wrong. That’s
hardly a surprise. Anyone who claims to find empirical errors, and is
minimally serious, will at the very least provide a few particles of
evidence – some quotes, references, at least something. But there is
nothing here – which, I’m afraid, doesn’t surprise me either. I’ve come
across instances of Žižek’s concept of empirical fact and reasoned
argument.

For example, in the Winter 2008 issue of the German cultural journal Lettre International, Žižek
attributed to me a racist comment on Obama by Silvio Berlusconi. I
ignored it. Anyone who strays from ideological orthodoxy is used to this
kind of treatment. However, an editor of Harper’s magazine, Sam
Stark, was interested and followed it up. In the January 2009 issue he
reports the result of his investigation. Žižek said he was basing the
attribution on something he had read in a Slovenian magazine. A
marvelous source, if it even exists.

Noam
Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the
professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an
accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical
tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left
of this tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically
verifiable and rooted in reality.

Žižek has countered with the
side-swipe that nobody had been so empirically wrong throughout his life
as Chomsky. He brought up Chomsky's supposed support for the Khmer
Rouge in the 1970s and Chomsky's later self-justification that there
hadn't been empirical evidence at the time of the crimes of the Khmer
Rouge. It has all got rather heated and intemperate, but then, debates
on the left are like that. More time is spent ripping flesh out of each
other than it is trying to find a common cause against an apparently
invisible and impregnable enemy. But terms have to be defined, ground
has to be laid out.